| Not to sound alarmist here, but will you get your kids' Christmas toys in time? That's a fair question to ask as the world faces a backlog of goods never before seen in the modern economy, right before the holiday season. The problem, in a paragraph: Stuck at home — and now, accustomed to being stuck at home — Americans are buying too much stuff. And as factories across the globe struggle amid the pandemic, there aren't enough people and parts to make things, enough ships to get them across the seas, enough space in ports to store it, enough port workers to unload it, enough truck drivers and railroad workers to get it to the purchasers, enough warehouse workers taking jobs to sort it — and no one really knows how long this back up will last or how to fix it.  Container ships wait to be offloaded in a crowded Port of Los Angeles in September. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) | (That being said, there is a lot more than one paragraph to this complex global issue, and The Washington Post's David Lynch has an in-depth look at it.) Not to sound alarmist to Democrats, but if people don't get their gifts in time, will voters blame President Biden and his party for it? Voters unreasonably blame presidents for all sorts of pocketbook problems that presidents can't fix, like high gasoline prices (which are also happening right now). Republicans are trying to make it so. It ties in with their arguments that Democrats are big spenders and causing prices to go up (since this backlog is causing prices to go up.) Biden is trying to get out in front of it all. He appointed a port envoy. He held a meeting today with business groups and announced that a major port in Los Angeles will start working 24/7. He knows this is going to matter for the midterm elections, said Betsey Stevenson, an economist who served on an advisory council to former president Barack Obama. "People don't like volatility and they definitely don't like not being able to get what they want," she said. "So I do think it is a political problem, and I do think he has to solve it." But, perhaps frustratingly for the president, economists I talked to underscore that this is a global problem Biden has little control over. A stat that has Democrats worried: 4.4 percent Those are the average percentage points by which Democrats have won the popular vote in presidential elections going back to 2004. You'd think that's a good thing for Democrats, right? But Republicans actually won more states — and won some of those presidential elections — all while getting fewer votes. That's just one of several structural problems facing Democrats as they try to keep their hold on both chambers of Congress and the White House in upcoming elections, The Fix's Aaron Blake writes. 'These numbers show that for Democrats to win each of the three levers of power, they have to win significantly more votes than Republicans," he writes. "They've been doing that, but even that has only been good enough for bare majorities and narrow wins." Did Trump just make elected Republicans' lives a whole lot harder? Today, a judge in Georgia threw out a lawsuit by Trump allies alleging fraud. (Yes, those kinds of lawsuits are still happening.) Trump is banned from Twitter, but judging by the statements he's releasing to reporters, he's really mad about it. In one of those, he said: "If we don't solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in '22 or '24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do." "Republicans will not be voting in '22 or '24″: That's the last thing that Republican leaders in Congress want to hear their party leader tell their party's base — not to vote. They privately blame Trump's false insistence that the election was stolen for how they lost the Senate in 2020; GOP voters in Georgia who feared the election was rigged didn't turn out in as high numbers in a runoff to decide control of the upper chamber. Is Trump laying the groundwork to depress Republican turnout in midterms again, for the sake of refusing to let go of his election lie? It kind of sounds like it. | 
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